Co-Founding & Scaling Craft Cask: A Whisky Media Platform
The Origin
Romanos Boraine and I launched Craft Cask based on our shared passion for whisky and to combine our skills in multimedia design and SEO, creating a media brand that covers whisky brands and the industry.
The platform served as an experimentation and showcase playground for our organic publishing capabilities, combining editorial reviews with technical tools and list roundups to build authority in the spirits niche.
The Approach
Our organic growth plan combined search-optimized list posts with B2C digital utilities:
Local Tasting Roundups
Our highest performing content types were roundups and list posts of the best tasting venues in different cities from countries around the world, such as South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Interactive Industry Calculators
We created custom whiskey dilution and production calculators. These calculators have successfully received natural backlinks from external authorities and even universities.
Newsletter Audience Growth
We started a whiskey newsletter alongside our organic content strategy, growing the subscriber base to 381 active contacts/subscribers.
Google Discover & News Content
We expanded into publishing whiskey industry news content, which performed exceptionally well in Google Discover feeds and overall organic search.
This strategy was highly shared on social media by industry icons, including master distiller Andy Watts (James Sedgwick Distillery / Three Ships / Metanoia founder), as well as by the featured tasting venues and whiskey brands themselves.
Our B2B news publishing enabled us to secure an exclusive interview with Brothers Bond, receiving review release batches of their bourbon to review, which was a major highlight for us.
In 2025, we put the project on ice as other priorities took over but we plan to relaunch the brand and put a new strategy in place.
The Results
Craft Cask established strong search authority in the whiskey publishing space prior to putting the project on hold.
Google Search Console logs confirmed a highly successful visibility curve, averaging a 1.1% CTR sitewide.
GA4 reports tracked 27,818 unique users from search, with an average engagement time of 1m 03s.
Whisky newsletter grew list size to 381 direct contacts acquired organically through the site content.
Performance Data & Analytics
Switch tabs below to view the verified Ahrefs organic keywords, Search Console dashboards, and editorial publication screenshots.
Ahrefs Performance (March 2025): Peak visibility state. Average organic traffic scaled to 1,027 visits/month, traffic value reached $899, Domain Rating climbed to 11, and the site secured 1,577 total keyword positions.
Need help scaling your search channels?
I build custom, async-first media and search roadmaps that deliver high-intent users, direct audience lists, and lasting rank positioning.